The Unremarkable Heart (5 page)

Slowly, in her little girl voice, Danielle catalogued out the subsequent encounters, each time shifting the blame.

‘I was late with an assignment.’

‘I was going to miss my curfew.’

‘He said it would be the last time.’

And on and on and on until it really was the very last time, when Grace had walked into Richard’s office at home. She wanted to know if her dad wanted some popcorn. She found instead her dad raping her best friend.

‘That’s why …’ Danielle gasped, looking up at June. ‘That’s the night …’

June didn’t have to be told. Even if she wanted to, there was no way she could clear that night from her mind. June had been working in her sewing room. Danielle and Grace were upstairs eating popcorn, lamenting their lost chance at the regional championship. Richard was in his office. Martha Parson called, looking for her daughter. Richard offered to drive her home but the girl chose to walk. Why hadn’t June thought it strange that a fifteen-year-old girl would rather walk six blocks in the cold than take a lift from her best friend’s father?

‘It’s my fault,’ Danielle managed between sobs. ‘Grace saw us, and …’ Her eyes were nearly swollen shut from crying. Her shoulders folded in so tightly that she looked as if she was being sucked backward down a tube.

There was a long row of windows behind Danielle and her parents. The sun was at June’s back, and she could see Richard’s reflection in the glass. His face was passive. There was a glint of white from his glasses. She glanced down and saw that his hands were in his lap.

She glanced down and saw that he was enjoying the story.

By the time the deposition was over, June’s jaw was so tight that she could not open her mouth to speak. Her spine straightened hard as steel. Her hands clenched into fists.

And yet, she did not say a word. Not when the girl had described a birthmark on Richard’s back, a scar just below his knee, a mole at the base of his penis. Not when she talked about the obsessive way he’d stroked his hands through her hair. The way he had held her from behind and used his hand on her. The way he had seduced this fifteen-year-old child the same way he had seduced June.

And June had thought of her words, long ago, to Grace. ‘Which is more possible,’ she had asked. ‘That every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?’

June had left the prosecutor’s office without a word to anyone. She drove straight to the school administration offices, where they gladly accepted her temporary leave of absence. She went to the dollar store and bought a packet of underwear, a toothbrush and a comb. She checked into a hotel room and did not go home until the newspaper headlines told her that Richard would not be there.

He had left the heat on eighty, a man who had fastidiously turned off hall lights and cranked down the thermostat on the coldest days. The seat was up on all the toilets. All the bowls were full of excrement. Dirty dishes spilled over in the sink. Trash was piled into the corner of the kitchen. The stripped mattress held the faint odor of urine.

‘Fuck you, too,’ June had mumbled as she burned his clothes in the backyard barbecue.

The school board couldn’t fire her for being married to an imprisoned sex offender. Instead, she was moved to the school in the worst part of town where routinely she was called to testify in court cases concerning students who’d been accused of armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, and any other number of horrors. Her social life was non-existent. There were no friends left for the woman who had defended a pedophile. There were no shoulders to cry on for the principal who had called the students who’d been raped by her husband a pack of lying whores.

Over the years, June had considered giving an interview, writing a book, telling the world what it was like to be in that room, sitting across from Danielle Parson, and knowing that her husband had just as good as killed them both. Each time June sat down to write the story, the words backed up like bile in her throat. What could she say in defense of herself? She had never publicly admitted her husband’s guilt. June Connor, a woman who had relished the English language, could find no words to explain herself.

She had shared a bed with Richard for eighteen years. She had born him a child. She had lost their child. They had loved together. They had grieved together. And all the while, he was a monster.

What kind of woman didn’t see that? What kind of educator, what kind of principal, lived in a house where a fifteen-year-old girl was brutally sodomized and did not notice?

Pride. Sheer determination. She would not explain herself. She did not owe anyone a damn explanation. So, she kept it all bottled up inside of her, the truth an angry, metastasizing tumor.

‘Another story about the weather,’ Richard said, rustling pages as he folded the paper. ‘Umbrellas are suggested.’

Her heart fluttered again, doing an odd triple beat. The tightness in her chest turned like a vise.

‘What is it?’ Richard reached for the mask hanging on the oxygen tank.

June waved him away, her vision blurring on her hand so that it seemed like a streak of light followed the movement. She moved her hand again, fascinated by the effect.

‘June?’

Her fingers were numbing, the bones of her hand slowly de-gloved. She felt her breath catch, and panic filled her – not because the time was here, but because she still had not asked him the question.

‘What is it?’ He sat on the edge of the bed, his leg touching hers. ‘June?’ His voice was raised. ‘Should I call an ambulance?’

She looked at his hand holding hers. His square fingers. His thick wrists. There were age spots now. She could see the blue veins under his skin.

The first time June held Richard’s hand, her stomach had tickled, her heart had jumped, and she’d finally understood Austen and Brontë and every silly sonnet she’d ever studied.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
.

This was the feeling she wanted to take with her – not the horror of the last twenty years. Not the sight of her daughter lying dead. Not the questions about how much Grace knew, how much she had suffered. Not Danielle Parson, the pretty young girl who could only make it through the day with the help of heroin.

June wanted that feeling the first time she had held her child. She wanted that bliss from her wedding day, the first time Richard had made love to her. There were happy times in this home. There were birthdays and surprise parties and Thanksgivings and wonderful Christmases. There was warmth and love. There was Grace.

‘Grace,’ Richard said, as if he could read her mind. Or perhaps she had said the word, so sweet on her lips. The smell of her shampoo. The way her tiny clothes felt in June’s hand. Her socks were impossibly small. June had pressed them to her mouth one day, kissing them, thinking of kissing her daughter’s feet.

Richard cleared his throat. His tone was low. ‘You want the truth.’

June tried to shake her head, but her muscles were gone, her brain disconnecting from the stem, nerve impulses wandering down vacant paths. It was here. It was so close. She was not going to find religion this late in the game, but she wanted lightness to be the last thing in her heart, not the darkness his words promised to bring.

‘It’s true,’ he told her, as if she didn’t know this already. ‘It’s true what Danielle said.’

June forced out a groan of air. Valentine’s Day cards. Birthday balloons. Mother’s Day breakfasts. Crayon drawings hanging on the refrigerator. Skinned knees that needed to be kissed. Monsters that were chased away by a hug and a gentle stroke of hair.

‘Grace saw us.’

June tried to shake her head. She didn’t need to hear it from his mouth. She didn’t need to take his confession to her grave. Let her have this one thing. Let her have at least a moment of peace.

He leaned in closer. She could feel the heat from his mouth. ‘Can you hear me, wife?’

She had no more breath. Her lungs froze. Her heart lurched to a stop.

‘Can you hear me?’ he repeated.

June’s eyes would not close. This was the last minute, second, millisecond. She was not breathing. Her heart was still. Her brain whirred and whirred, seconds from burning itself out.

Richard’s voice came to her down the long tunnel. ‘Grace didn’t kill herself because she caught me fucking Danielle.’ His tongue caught between his teeth. There was a smile on his lips. ‘She did it because she was jealous.’

Read on for an extract from Karin Slaughter’s new bestseller, available now …

Broken

When the body of a young woman is discovered deep beneath the icy waters of Lake Grant, a note left under a rock by the shore points to suicide. But within minutes, it becomes clear that this is no suicide. It’s a brutal, cold-blooded murder.

All too soon, former Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton – home for Thanksgiving after a long absence – finds herself unwittingly drawn into the case. The chief suspect is desperate to see her, but when she arrives at the local police station she is met with a horrifying sight – he lies dead in his cell, the words ‘Not me’ scrawled across the walls.

Something about his confession doesn’t add up and, deeply suspicious of Lena Adams, the detective in charge, Sara immediately calls in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Shortly afterwards, Special Agent Will Trent is brought in from his vacation to investigate. But he is immediately confronted with a wall of silence. Grant County is a close-knit community with loyalties and ties that run deep. And the only person who can tell the truth about what really happened is dead …

CHAPTER ONE

Fortunately, the winter weather meant the body at the bottom of the lake would be well preserved, though the chill on the shore was bone-aching, the sort of thing that made you strain to remember what August had been like. The sun on your face. The sweat running down your back. The way the air conditioner in your car blew out a fog because it could not keep up with the heat. As much as Lena Adams strained to remember, all thoughts of warmth were lost on this rainy November morning.

‘Found her,’ the dive captain called. He was directing his men from the shore, his voice muffled by the constant shush of the pouring rain. Lena held up her hand in a wave, water sliding down the sleeve of the bulky parka she had thrown on when the call had come in at three this morning. The rain wasn’t hard, but it was relentless, tapping her back insistently, slapping against the umbrella that rested on her shoulder. Visibility was about thirty feet. Everything beyond that was coated in a hazy fog. She closed her eyes, thinking back to her warm bed, the warmer body that had been wrapped around her.

The shrill ring of a phone at three in the morning was never a good sound, especially when you were a cop. Lena had woken out of a dead sleep, her heart pounding, her hand automatically snatching up the receiver, pressing it to her ear. She was the senior detective on call, so she in turn had to start other phones ringing across south Georgia. Her chief. The coroner. Fire and rescue. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, to let them know that a body had been found on state land. The Georgia Emergency Management Authority, who kept a list of eager civilian volunteers ready to look for dead bodies on a moment’s notice.

They were all gathered here at the lake, but the smart people were waiting in their vehicles, heat blasting while a chill wind rocked the chassis like a baby in a cradle. Dan Brock, the proprietor of the local funeral home who did double duty as the town coroner, was asleep in his van, head back against the seat, mouth gaping open. Even the EMTs were safely tucked inside the ambulance. Lena could see their faces peering through the windows in the back doors. Occasionally, a hand would reach out, the ember of a cigarette glowing in the dawn light.

She held an evidence bag in her hand. It contained a letter found near the shore. The paper had been torn from a larger piece – college ruled, approximately eight and a half inches by six. The words were all caps. Ballpoint pen. One line. No signature. Not the usual spiteful or pitiful farewell, but clear enough:
I WANT IT OVER
.

In many ways, suicides were more difficult investigations than homicides. With a murdered person, there was always someone you could blame. There were clues you could follow to the bad guy, a clear pattern you could lay out to explain to the family of the victim exactly why their loved one had been stolen away from them. Or, if not why, then who the bastard was who’d ruined their lives.

With suicides, the victim is the murderer. The person upon whom the blame rests is also the person whose loss is felt most deeply. They are not around to take the recriminations for their death, the natural anger anyone feels when there is a loss. What the dead leave instead is a void that all the pain and sorrow in the world can never fill. Mother and father, sisters, brothers, friends and other relatives – all find themselves with no one to punish for their loss.

And people always want to punish someone when a life is unexpectedly taken.

This was why it was the investigator’s job to make sure every single inch of the death scene was measured and recorded. Every cigarette butt, every discarded piece of trash or paper, had to be catalogued, checked for fingerprints, and sent to the lab for analysis. The weather was noted in the initial report. The various officers and emergency personnel on scene were recorded in a log. If a crowd was present, photographs were taken. License plates were checked. The suicide victim’s life was investigated just as thoroughly as with a homicide: Who were her friends? Who were her lovers? Was there a husband? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Were there angry neighbors or envious co-workers?